Actually, Peter Dinklage Was Good in 'Destiny'

With Destiny 2 coming out in such a short amount of time, it is appropriate to talk about one of the biggest injustices in video game voice acting history. Then the original Destiny launched in 2014, some people pointed out things they didn't like. Some people didn't care for the storytelling. Others thought that the PVP was unnecessarily complicated. Many, many more screamed about one particular thing: Peter Dinklage was Ghost, your robot friend, and his voice acting was bad.

This opinion was heard so loudly, and apparently was so fixable, that the release of The Taken King expansion also came with a replacement robot pal: Nolan North, the voice actor for Nathan Drake and a whole host of other characters around the gaming world.

I'm here to drop truth bombs: Peter Dinklage was good, actually. Go listen to some of his lines. Many people criticized Dinklage for being dispassionate and for not selling the lines. However, upon close attention, it's clear that he's acting his ass off. After all, this Ghost found you rotting on the ground and raised you up from the dead so that, just maybe, you could save the galaxy. If not you, then someone else. A lack of emotion makes sense there.

Dinklage also clearly made a choice to embrace straight-faced statements of fact when reading some of the goofier lines in the game ("Careful. It's power is dark."). Dinklage is, I think, playing the Ghost the same way that he plays other nerd characters who are both bumbling and hyper-competent.

There's a lot of self-seriousness cut with "well, here we go I guess" attitude in Dinklage's Ghost that drops out of North's performance. North's Ghost is consistently in awe of the world, making sure the player knows that this place, wherever it is, is special. For Dinklage, none of it is special. After all, he's a robot, and he's been reading the data of this place the entire time.

Ultimately, Peter Dinklage's Ghost still feels like its own character, with a history and feelings that make it less enthusiastic about this whole enterprise. It's a character who can tell you about a wizard from the moon without surprise or emotional response. It's special because it suggests that moon wizards are not gee-wiz, wowza things; there are lots of them, and they have magic, and they live on the moon. It establishes that the fantastic is normal, that this world is fundamentally different from any that we can experience in our day-to-day.

Nolan North's Ghost is one who is wholly there for you, the player, and whose entire existence seems to be framing the world and its events in the way to make you the most delighted. Give me the Dinklage depth instead, please. When you're letting that North Ghost guide you around wherever the hell in Destiny 2, just think about the weird deadpan lack of surprise that could be accompanying you. Just image what you're missing without Peter Dinklage by your side.